carolyn christovbakargiev

Carolyn Christov Bakargiev on Regular Animals: What begins with Berger’s claim in “Why Look at Animals?” (1977) — that modernity breaks the reciprocal gaze between humans and animals — reaches its endpoint in Beeple’s robot dogs (2025). Berger mourns the disappearance of animals as living others who once looked back at us. Beeple shows what comes after that loss: animals re-enter as machines that see without relation. The dog becomes an interface for surveillance and image extraction. Its gaze is no longer mutual; it is operational. The robot dogs photograph the public, already surveilled, and return altered images filtered through the logic of artists, platforms, dictators, and tech billionaires. Authority replaces encounter. Anthropomorphism (human heads on machines) softens this violence by inviting misplaced empathy, while real agency remains hidden in a back office. Unlike Warhol’s icons, damaged by visibility, or Gormley’s Angel of the North in Gateshead (1998), which insists on a grounded, non-machinic survival of the subject, Beeple’s figures neither suffer nor resist history. They administer it. As fallen angels in plural hierarchies, they execute the storm of progress rather than being carried or broken by it. Seen through Berger, Beeple’s robot dogs do not represent animals. They represent the final extinction of the animal’s gaze, which is replaced by machines that look, record, and return images without vulnerability, reciprocity, or response-ability. Warhol’s icons (Marilyn, Elvis) are fallen angels of desire. They are lifted by mass media only to be worn down by repetition. Visibility harms them. Warhol stays with their fragility: the image wounds the subject even as it immortalizes it. His angels fall because of circulation. Gormley, by contrast, proposes a non-machinic persistence of the subject. The Angel of the North stands, immobile, iron-heavy, resisting both Walter Benjamin’s idea of the storm of progress (1944) and the dispersal of the body into networks. Unlike Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), blown backward, powerless before history, Beeple’s dogs are fallen angels of administration. Plural, remotely controlled, they mediate vision in angelic hierarchies.

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It's time to impeach activist Judges! "We must impeach judges who are grossly undermining the will of the people and destroying America. It is the only way." -Elon Musk

I literally challenged Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off. What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose. Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop. PEACE NOW!!